Hadassa Ben Ari has spent years in the public eye without ever really wanting to be there. The Israeli media personality and author, known to many as the ex-wife of singer Hanan Ben Ari, never had the luxury of keeping her story private. A high-profile divorce has a way of making that decision for you.
"I never had the privilege of my story being personal," she says simply, in a new interview. "My gaze is always inward, toward my children and my home."
Now Ben Ari is channeling that exposure into something on her own terms: a new book, a growing presence on stages and in writing workshops, and an unlikely creative partnership with Tzvi Ben Meir, a man who grew up in a settlement and left religious observance, yet somehow found himself sharing a stage with one of the most recognizably religious women in Israeli media.
Their joint evening, held as part of Book Month, brings together Ben Ari's "What Do You Know About Longing" and Ben Meir's "Whose Sukkah Falls" - two books that look like opposites and read like siblings. Both are about departure. Both are about identity. Both are about the kind of heartbreak that, if you're lucky, turns into something worth saying out loud.
